Although much of the world celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25 as the supposed birthday of Jesus of Nazareth, and our calendar is based on the assumption that year-counting began the year of his birth, the chances that he was born on Dec. 25, 1 BC (there was no year 0), are extremely remote. Christmas is [more...]
Dire predictions of worldwide calamity in 2012 may be a good way of selling books and movie tickets — but the chances anything remotely like the dire predictions will happen is about the same as that they happened in 1982, 1988 or 2000, other recent dates for which the end of the world or something [more...]
Nobody knows for certain, but chances are that our seven-day week is historically connected with the fact that the Babylonians and other early astronomers recognized seven celestial bodies that weren’t in fixed positions like the stars — the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. In fact, in English the names of three [more...]
The date of Easter varies each year. Roughly speaking, it’s the Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox, but it’s a bit more complicated than that (see: How is the date of Easter calculated?). Here are all the dates of Easter Sunday for this century: 23 April 2000, 15 April 2001, 31 March 2002, [more...]
The date of Easter varies from year to year, and the process of calculating it is known as computus. Colloquially the rule is sometimes stated as “Easter Sunday is the Sunday following the full moon after the Vernal (Spring) Equinox”, but there are some subtle inaccuracies in this definition. The date of the Spring Equinox varies [more...]
Once UK shops have cleared out their Valentines, they stock up with Mother’s Day cards. In amongst them will be a few that wish you a Happy Mothering Sunday. It’s the Sunday about half way between Pancake Day (Mardi Gras) and Easter, and has been a day for recognising English mothers for several centuries. If you [more...]
Although there have been significant changes, the calendar as we know it dates to the Roman times. So it shouldn’t be surprising that many of the names of the months have names similar to what the Romans used. January is named after Janus. Appropriately for the first month of the year, Janus was Roman god of [more...]
Everyone probably remembers the Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme learned in grade school to help you remember the number of days in a month. Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; February has twenty-eight alone, All the rest have thirty-one, Excepting leap-year, that’s the time When February’s days are twenty-nine. Three years out of every four, a year has 365 days in [more...]
There was once a February 30th, but in rather unusual circumstances. The old Julian calendar wasn’t quite in step with the journey of the earth around the sun, and the seasons were gradually getting out of step with the calendar. Pope Gregory XIII realised that the calendar could be made more accurate by adjusting the rules for [more...]